The oldest, most prestigious merit scholarship program in the United States
Biweekly report, summer of 2010
For our last Sunday in Miami, my housemates and I spontaneously decided to go to the Everglades.
As it turns out, “spontaneous” and “Everglades” are two words that should not be used together in the same sentence.
Emily's class in Miami, Florida Photo by Emily Zuehlke '13
We chose one of the hottest days of the summer to venture into a land where breeze is something you only read about in books about faraway places.
Even the alligators knew it was too hot for fun, and they had retreated into the shadiest, swampiest parts of the Everglades, where three wilderness-fearing and one snake-fearing girls were not about to venture.
As we walked down down the trail through dense underbrush, my friends and I rapidly converted our water suppy to sweat. While people with more logic than us might have pulled an alligator and gone home to hunker down in a pool for the day, we kept going and, more impressively, laughed the entire way.
We were little kids in a candy shop, for every bizarrely shaped plant, monster fish lazily floating in the river, curious bird, grasshopper, turtle, and baby alligator enthralled and fascinated us.
I suddenly understood how my students must have felt several weeks earlier when I had taken them outside to explore the ecosystem at our site: exhausted from their senses working overtime, energized from the delight of watching how the world progresses without human help and interference, and fascinated as they discovered the complexity lying beneath the simplicity of nature.
Later that day, as a surprise rain storm overtook the little boat we were using to explore the River of Grass, I realized that I was one again rediscovering nature and that maybe, given the power of the natural world, the Everglades should only be experienced spontaneously.
